>From: Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu>
>
> >That was I believe the original question. I guess I am suggesting that
> >the original question was the wrong one. Both marxism _and_ science are
> >(as I think the whole cluster of threads showed) contested categories,
Sure. That's axiomatic.
> >and the question of whether marxism is a science cannot be separated
> >from the question of what constitutes a scientific discipline.
Well, although I think that Marxist thought includes many scientific theories and research programs, as well as a lot of other stuff, I think it is silly to say that Marxism is "a scientific discipline" like chemistry or something of that sort. Rather, its scientific parts spread across several scientific disciplines as normally understood--economics, sociology, polotical science--comprising distinctive approaches within these disciplines.
And I
> >think it is possible to argue that the current "narrower sense" of the
> >word science is a barrier to both "scientific" (however defined) and
> >marxist thought.
> >
Sure, it's possible to argue that, and people do, but until they offer something better, I won't be persuaded. Science as currently understood is basically how we know things. When I was in grad school, my first year, I had a class on Theory of Knowledge (Is Knowledge Justified True Belief? How can we avoid scepticism? Are there Foundations to knowledge?) I found it very dull. ANd I had a class in philosophy of science (what's an explanation? What's a scientific law? When is a theory confirmed? Who is Thomas Kuhn and why is he saying all these strange things? [Kuhn had been a teacher of both mine and my grad school phil of sci teacher, Peter Railton]). It was clear that was where the action was. I never looked back.
I am familiar with the social critique of science lit, which is mostly scientifically ignorant: after the Sokal hoax I am surprised those people dare to show their faces. I do not regard science as above critique or analysis on a lot of dimensions, including scientific ones (I was a Kuhn student after all), and political ones. I do not think it exhausts everything important that can be said. Carrol and I can agree that we would trade a whole stack of issues of Nature and Science for a few pages of Milton. It is not even all that is important about Marxism or radical thought. The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways, the point, however, is to change it. But all that said, to _know) something in a way that is not, in the Maoist pejorative sense of the word, empiricist, is to have a scientific explanation of it.
Scott says:
>
>
>That is the essence of the current mess in philosophy of science. Lacking
>any generally defensible methodological definition of science, we can't
>separate the science from the non-science. It's too easy to find useful
>knowledge that doesn't come from whatever methodological choices you make.
I disagree with Scott. I don't think that finding a demarcation criterion is important at all, and we don't need a definition of science. Science is what scientists do. Broadly speaking, what they do is work within the Galileian tradition of trying to formulate and test precisely stated empirically testible hypotheses about the naturea nd behavior of the public phenomena they are investigating. It's not interesting to try to tell in advance whethera certain sort of investigation is scientific. More plausible and worthwhile is to accept the claim of anything that says it's scientific to be scientific, and then subject it to the usual criteria of scientific evaluation. Thus on this reading, creation science is just very bad science. A lot of Marxism is like that, because it knows in advance thae results it wants, and doesn't really want testing, just "confirmation." But not all, not all. And not Marx, who welcomed all scientific criticism.
>>
>There isn't an easy answer to this. The best answer I have is to look at
>the productive practices of a body of theory and abandon the ideas that are
>going nowhere, while trying to remain open-minded about the possibility
>that
>they might ultimately have some value somewhere.
Sounds sort of like Lakatos on progressive and degenerating research programs. But look, you aren't asking: what's science, what's not? Some scientific research programs are degenerating. I'd argue that this is true of value theory. Really you are asking: what's good scienvce? What's bad?
But even this is
>inadequate - in the end you have to use purely subjective criteria to
>evaluate new ideas.
Huh?
>Nottale who is
>doing some really interesting research on the problem of measurement in
>quantum mechanics and has a truly radical idea about how the problem might
>be solved without recourse to a lot of the weirdness that's been bandied
>about for the last 70 years. . . . >However, he has no experiment that can
>falsify his ideas, and no productive
>practice to point to. I'm evaluating his work, provisionally, on the basis
>of how cool I think it is. I have no defense to offer against someone who
>wants nothing to do with it.
Well, if it's consistent with what's known and avoids a lot of quantum wierdness, that's a defense, and it's not subjective. Also, it's not irrational or subjective to give a promising idea a run for its money. Superstring theory in particle physics is a lot like the work you describe. So far, it's a lot of cool math without an experimental test. But the math is really cool, and it might make sense of a lot of stuff that we don't otherwise know howt to tie together. But that too is not a subjective criterion, but an objective one.
jks
>
_________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp.